The US: the real 47 per cent

There is
another 47% - Americans who do not vote in Presidential elections. Is America the only democracy that does not
help its people vote?

When a leaked video of Mitt Romney disparaging
and discounting 47 percent of the electorate became infamous overnight, pundits
and talking heads were shocked at his ability to discount almost half of
America’s citizenry.

But there is another 47 percent of the
electorate that politicians routinely write off without much risk: since 1980,
on average, 47.1 percent of the population has not voted in Presidential elections. Indeed, non-voters in off-year elections is
even higher, at 62.5 percent.

America’s rates are lower than those in most
countries we like to compare ourselves to.
66 percent of those eligible vote in the United Kingdom. Participation hits 75 percent in the
Netherlands, 87 percent in Denmark, and a whopping 93 in Australia.

Why are we Americans so far behind?

America’s low voter rates are often bemoaned as
a sign of apathy, but just how easy is it to register and then vote? Should voters have to go out of their way to
register? Measures that would make
voting easier such as election day registration and the so-called “Motor Voter”
laws, which register citizens to vote at the same time as they apply for a
driver’s license -- have encountered significant opposition.

Thirty states have laws, most of which were
passed in the last few years, that require state-issued identity cards to vote,
despite the fact that scholars and observers say specific incidents of voter
fraud are minimal.

My own short relationship with the ballot box
has been fraught.

It started in my first weeks of college when I
was forced to drive six hours to vote in the gubernatorial race. I made the trip the following fall in for the
Senate race, owing to a ruling by our local electoral board that students who
lived in dormitories in Virginia were ineligible to register to vote.

I was one of thousands of students in our
hamlet of Williamsburg, VA that were not allowed to register to vote in the
town until fall 2007, when a new voter registrar reversed the policy of the
previous registrar after he’d been ousted for embezzlement of public
funds.

In the 2008 presidential elections, our
precinct had the second highest voter turnout in the state. But we were lucky. Numerous students from the historically black
Norfolk State University who lived in dorms had their registration applications
turned down. Non-governmental
organizations focused on voter protection were not allowed to see the rejected
applications and the reasons they were turned down, even after they sued in
Virginia court.

Until August 2009, the state of Virginia did
not have one standard policy regarding whether or not students could register
to vote if they lived in dormitories, rather, it was left to each of the 134
electoral boards to decide on their own.

Since my graduation I’ve had to jump through
hoops to make sure my registration is current, pay to update my driver’s
license with a new address, and wade through an unwieldy website to find out
where I need to vote.

And I am not alone.

“We are the only democracy that does not help
people vote,” says Richard Briffault, an election law professor at Columbia
University Law School. He points to
Canada’s practice of automatically registering voters during the census and
other states like Belgium that fine citizens for not voting.

He says that the new restrictions on voter
identification complicate what is already an unwieldy process for many eligible
voters:

“Many states now require a voter ID, but they
don’t provide it. In some states you can
get one for free, but in others it can be quite costly.”

Eleven percent of the population lacks a
driver’s license or other form of identification required by the states with
the most stringent rules, according to New York University’s Brennan Center for
Justice, and the rate for African Americans is double that.

Another reason why turnout is so low, says
Jessica Trounstine, a professor of political science at University of
California-Merced who studies voting habits, is the fact that we have more
elections: 80 percent of races are not held concurrently with general or
statewide elections.

“That is the biggest depressor of turnout,”
says Trounstine, and it is exacerbated by a lack of voter information: 45
states are not legally required to inform citizens about planned elections and
registration deadlines, and some receive scant media attention.

In 1792, Congress passed a law determining that
federal electors would meet in December, and that elections had to be held within
a 34-day period before then.

Until the mid to late 1800s, the electoral
process was controlled by political parties, who registered voters and then
printed and disseminated the ballots.

Then it was slowly taken over by state
governments in the second half of the twentieth century in piecemeal, patchwork
fashion resulting in great discrepancies across the country, and even within
states, regarding registration and the conduct of elections that persists
today.

In 1845, with faster information and travel, it
no longer made sense to hold elections on different days in different states.
Congress passed a law mandating that the day for choosing electors to send to
the Electoral College would occur the first Tuesday in November. This made a
lot of sense at the time because it occurred after the fall harvest, and it
gave voters who needed to travel enough time to get to the polls without
interrupting Sunday worship in America’s predominantly Christian society.

Voter turnout peaked in the 1920s and citizens
have not voted in such high numbers since. Trounstine says this is due to the decline in
prevalence of political machines and local party bosses.

Briffault notes that it coincides with the
advent of cinema. With new forms of
entertainment available, people started paying less attention to campaigns,
debates and rallies.

Both point to the fact that elections occur on
only one day, Tuesday, during the work week.

“I think there is a clear ambivalence about the
fact that more voters yield better results,” says Andrzej Rapaczynski,
constitutional law professor at Columbia University. “There is credible research that turnout is
higher in countries with a lot of instability.
People don’t vote in the US because they don’t see the out come changing
their lives in major ways.”

Not voting, he argues, is an important part of
the American political system.

“If everyone votes, then it is just one middle
voter who decides, thus pushing both candidates towards the center with few
differences between themselves,” he says.

“With 100 percent participation, all
differences would disappear.”

Yet statistics show that wealthier people tend
to vote in much higher numbers. And that the poorest and most disaffected are
those who vote least.

“Age and income do a lot of the work in
predicting voter turnout,” says Dr. Amy Lerman, a professor at Princeton
University who focuses on political behavior.

Lerman says that the new voter ID laws will
depress the vote disproportionately for the poor.

“Evidence suggests it will make it more
difficult to vote, specifically for low income and minority voters,” she says.

Briffault concurs. “It is no accident that every state that
adopted voter ID requirements but one [Rhode Island] had a Republican
legislature when they added restrictions,” he says.

“Usually parties argue for or against coting?
rules if they stand to benefit from them,” Trounstine agrees.

Rapaczynski says that placing some limits on
registration ensures that only those who take a little initiative vote.

“As long as the system is not designed to keep
out people who are too busy or too poor to vote, it is not too crazy to ask for
reasonable interest,” says Rapaczynski.

Briffault, on the other hand, suggests a
nationwide voter database and some enshrined form of automatically registering
voters, or allowing them to register on election day, stressing that voter
participation is lower the further in advance the deadline to register is.

“Data shows that 80 percent of registered
voters actually vote, so the problem is just getting people registered.” He suggest that high schoolers be automatically
registered upon graduation, with avenues for non-graduates to register as
well. New citizens can get a voter card
along with their citizenship. He envisions a future in which polling places
are more like ATMs. But that’s still far
away.

Right now there isn’t enough infrastructure to
accommodate all eligible voters, as faulty machines in Florida were a major
factor in the 2000 elections. A recently
released study by the Verified Voting Foundation and the Rutgers Law School
Constitutional Litigation Clinic found that only five states are prepared to
handle voting machine errors in this cycle.

“The real truth is that if a lot of people
actually turned out, the system actually isn’t ready,” says Briffault.

About the author

Valerie Hopkins is an American
journalist based in New York City. She spent three years in the Balkans
reporting primarily on politics, transitional justice, organized crime and
corruption.

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